Thirty Years Ago, Wham! Played Beijing and Guangzhou. George Michael Died on Christmas Day
First published on the WeChat account A Certain Movie (ID: cinematik).
I slept until noon and woke to a flurry of messages on WeChat. Friends were asking about an old article I wrote last year about Wham!, and many wanted to repost it. Still half-asleep, I opened the post and was startled to see it had passed 100,000 views. Then I asked around in my feed and learned I had slept through the big news: George Michael had died, at 53, on Christmas Day.
Some things should not be said lightly, and some songs should not be sung carelessly. Wham!’s “Last Christmas” really had become his last Christmas.
I was genuinely sad. In high school, my English teacher taught us to sing “Careless Whisper.” It must be one of the most widely sung English songs in China; bootleg cassettes called Ten Great English Songs always included it.
But what I remember more vividly is Michael’s 1999 album of classic twentieth-century jazz covers, Songs from the Last Century. It holds so many memories. At the turn of the millennium, when everything felt chaotic, his voice kept us company for a long time.
So last winter we posted the article below without any particular occasion. It was not tied to a news story; I had simply seen a documentary about their China tour ten years earlier and wanted more people to know about it.
With no shame at all, I am reposting it tonight to remember the great singers of the last century who are gradually leaving us.
On April 10, 1985, about 15,000 people packed Beijing Workers’ Stadium to see the first Western superstar band to perform in China: Wham!
Wham! in China, 1985: George Michael (left) and Andrew Ridgeley (right)
At first the whole venue was quiet because no one knew how to respond. When George encouraged the audience to keep time with the music, people did not understand what he meant and politely applauded for a long time…
There were seats reserved for officials at the front…
Just sitting there, watching you onstage…
Halfway through the show, someone got so excited that they began dancing along with the band. Later, police officers pinned them down and escorted them out…
The band’s manager, Simon, recalled that about 7,500 people downstairs seemed frozen by the cameras and flashbulbs, while people in the upper half were dancing and shouting. The atmosphere was so strange.
Who were Wham!?
Younger readers may not recognize the Chinese name “Wei Meng Band,” but you have surely heard “Careless Whisper.” It still turns up on the background-music playlists of restaurants and hotels. Here is a live performance from thirty years ago:
Watch Wham! perform “Careless Whisper”
The organizers worried that Chinese audiences would not know Wham!’s songs, so they selected five hits, had new Chinese lyrics written for them, and invited the popular singer Cheng Fangyuan to perform them.
A cassette released by White Swan Records.
Auntie Cheng still gets emotional when she recalls the concert.
Watch Cheng Fangyuan recall the concert
Listen again to Auntie Cheng’s cover from that time:
5 minutes
The style from thirty years ago looks a little strange, doesn’t it? China had only just begun to have something called “pop music.” Besides Cheng Fangyuan, musicians such as Guo Feng and Cui Jian were there. Guo Feng recalled, “I will never forget that scene. The Chinese audience just stared, completely stunned.” Chinese musicians were soon able to recover from the shock. The next year, Guo Feng wrote “Let the World Be Filled with Love” and organized a concert of a hundred singers on the same stage. At that concert, Cui Jian performed his signature song “Nothing to My Name,” opening a new era.
Was it all just business?
Looking back thirty years later, the concert had deep cultural significance. But to Wham!’s manager at the time, Simon Napier-Bell, it was just a business deal.
Simon Napier-Bell
In 1985, just three years after forming, Wham! had become a major act in Britain and urgently needed to break into the American market. Another world tour would take too long, so they needed a faster way to raise their profile internationally—for example, becoming the first Western pop band to perform in China.
Simon came to China and used his contacts at the British Embassy to phone every government office he could find. He would ask whoever answered to tell the person in charge that a man named Simon Napier-Bell wanted to take them to dinner. Over 18 months, he made 13 trips to China and dined with more than a hundred officials at every level…
Simon’s strategy was simple: no event could convince the West that China had truly opened up better than a concert like this. Queen also wanted to make history in China. Simon used a small ploy and gave the authorities two photos to consider: Wham!, clean-cut and dressed like handsome young professionals, and Queen frontman Freddie Mercury, eccentric and unmistakably artistic. The Chinese side chose Wham!, just as Simon expected.
Simon invested heavily in the plan. He also hired Lindsay Anderson, one of the leading figures in Britain’s Free Cinema movement and a director of film, theatre, and documentaries, to travel with the band and film the whole visit. The idea was to make an idol documentary to take back to British fans. But Anderson had another vision: this was a historic event, not just a commercial performance. His documentary brings out more of the human detail and unexpected humor.
Lindsay Anderson, a leading figure in Britain’s Free Cinema movement. Best known for If….
Ticket prices and the audience
Some people recall that tickets cost 5 yuan and came with a Wham! cassette. That does not sound too expensive, considering eggs in Beijing then cost 1.29 yuan per half-kilo. But footage of people lining up for tickets suggests they cost at least 30 to 40 yuan, and buyers needed an introduction letter from their work unit. In 1985, the average monthly wage for a Chinese worker was 96 yuan.
Many people still could not get tickets, because most had been given away free to employees of work units such as the Ministry of Culture. Audience members recalled that many older people in the crowd did not look like pop fans at all. Still, plenty of people really did queue to buy tickets, and police had to keep order.
The audience lining up.
Scenes from Beijing
On April 7, 1985, Wham! flew from Hong Kong to Beijing. Almost everyone waiting at the airport was from the foreign press, so Simon had already achieved half his goal. The band stayed at the Sheraton Great Wall Hotel, China’s first international five-star hotel, which had opened in 1985.
The Sheraton Great Wall Hotel had a distinctly futuristic look.
This time, the Chinese side hosted a banquet at Diaoyutai, a very high-level venue. Before dinner, Wham! said their performance had something in common with Chinese opera: both were full of vitality and made abundant use of color.
During their days in Beijing, they visited Tiananmen Square, climbed the Great Wall, and went shopping. Anderson used the camera cleverly, contrasting Wham! being targeted by cameras and long lenses with ordinary Chinese visitors posing for souvenir photos nearby.
There were fewer visitors at the Great Wall then, and ordinary Chinese people were very curious to see foreigners.
They drew a crowd while out shopping.
They met an older man with a portable cassette player and put on one of their own tapes. The people gathered around listened happily.
The child below brings to mind Henri Cartier-Bresson’s famous photograph.
Scenes from Guangzhou
Guangzhou looked much livelier than Beijing, both in people’s spirits and in its economic development. Anderson seems to have loved the city’s energy; he filmed many beautiful scenes there.
People in Guangzhou looked stylish in suits and leather shoes, even when riding bicycles.
Fishing boats, ferries, and sand barges shared the Pearl River.
The sunset over Haizhu Bridge in this next photo is stunning…
They also visited Liurong Temple, where incense was always burning.
Lindsay Anderson (right) watches worshippers at Liurong Temple.
In Guangzhou, food comes first. The group visited a market selling “strange” ingredients, then went to a restaurant, where the chef gave them a warm “welcome.”
They even held a China–Britain football match on the lawn in front of the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall.
Love in Guangzhou.
After hearing the Cantonese opera tune “Bou Bou Gao,” the musicians got the urge to play.
There’s more beyond the sky
Lindsay Anderson’s cut was considered too “arty,” and he was fired during post-production. Wham! hired someone else to edit a different version, the one most often seen today, Wham! in China: Foreign Skies. It premiered at Wembley Arena and set a record for a film premiere, with 70,000 people in attendance.
Fortunately, Lindsay Anderson kept a copy of his own edit, which he titled If You Were There. It was not screened at a university film archive until about ten years ago. Some critics consider the documentary a match for Antonioni’s Chung Kuo, Cina.
At last, here is the complete version of Wham! in China. Thank you for staying with us to the end.
Watch the complete documentary Wham! in China
A final bonus: download the Wham! in China video file from Baidu Netdisk. Long-press the QR code below to open or save it.
